ON May 9th, 2018, PIKOM (The National ICT Association of Malaysia) launched SEA Dragon and its inaugural SEA Dragon Pitch Session. The platform is a Southeast Asian premier venture pitching platform for hot scale-up companies looking for Venture Capital funding, business mentoring and global market expansion.

Spearheaded by PIKOM Investment Chapter, the platform intends to help local entrepreneurs to take ICT-related ventures to higher level of growth by extending financial help, as well as market and technical assistance.

“The lack of funding and lack of public exposure that scaleups endure to move their companies to the next level, is what drove PIKOM to form SEA Dragon Venture Platform,” said Ganesh Kumar Bangah, PIKOM Chairman.

SEA Dragon Venture Platform is a week worth of mentoring, pitching, and meeting with venture capitals, which empowers entrepreneurs to step up to their chances of securing an international fundings to their scale ups.

For SEA Dragon Venture Platform 2018, 40 global venture capitalists and 28 scale ups companies that is selected out of 170 scale ups in South East Asia, were gathered in Nexus Oak Room, Bangsar South, to the best week to enhance their scale ups values.

These venture capitalist are such as 500 Startups (Silicon Valley), Ant Financial (China), and B Capital (Singapore). Among 28 scale ups that made it are Bodidata, Cloud of Goods, and Carsome.

“Entrepreneurship, and the entrepreneurs themselves, are the lifeblood of a strong economy. And it is for this reason we believe in programmes such as the SEA Dragon Venture Platform, where scale up companies gain the much-needed funding as well as benefiting from the mentoring sessions with established global investors, which undoubtedly will fuel their growth,” said Datuk Yasmin Mahmood, CEO of Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC).